Science explained with humor, analogy, and pop culture. (Because sometimes you just wanna understand a thing…)

BBC won, BBC two

Reliability doesn’t mean not hilarious

by chelsea schuyler

As I scan the BBC World News for ideas for blogs, sometimes I can barely get past the title for laughing. Some days are complete gems. For example, one single day and one single click to the Science and Environment page, gave me these results:

First headline: “Earth’s Core far hotter than thought.”

flippin hot, basically. eggs over sidewalk?

I love these kind of statements. Hey everyone, something we really can’t imagine is even more unimaginable than we’d ever imagined! Before, everyone disagreed about how hot the earth’s core was, though it was thought to be about 5000 degrees Celsius. How hot is that? Well, I’m all about the metric system, but let’s face it, in terms of boggling an American’s mind, you had us at Celsius. So what can we relate it to?

core of the matter

The all-time highest temperature on Earth’s surface is 56.7C (134F) in Death Valley, California in 1913. We almost broke the record this summer as you may recall hearing, the same time Las Vegas apparently thought, “what better time for an outdoor concert in the afternoon?’ 34 people were hospitalized for heat exhaustion, 200 more treated on the spot with shade and water. Shade? There wasn’t even shade?? Vegas, little comin to Jesus here. Be ye not experts on scorching, body-filleting temperatures? I guess you just really haven’t experienced the Vans unless your inner fluids are at a boiling point.

ANYWAY, now we estimate the Earth’s core at 6000C (11,oooF, ish), which is about the temperature on the surface of the sun. This is enormously helpful if you’re a scientist working with magnetic fields and earthquakes and things. For the lay person, it’s still just more friggin hot than whatever we thought friggin hot was. Who’s up for a Doors show??

Next headline: “UK shale gas bonanza ‘not assured’ ”

freak gasoline accident

I love picturing the author of this article, environmental analyst Roger Harrabin, deciding on the word “bonanza” for this piece. I mean, I suppose it’s effective, the last thing anyone wants is their bonanza not being assured. …So many birthday parties. And can you really have a gas bonanza that doesn’t imply some impeding horrible accident a la Zoolander gas fight explosion?

Next headline: “ ‘Urgent need’ to remove space debris”

Again with the word choice, I mean don’t you just feel like “urgent need” is limited to either really needing to pee, or fixing world wide problems like Darfur scale genocide? No spectrum, just those two. But this is actually pretty interesting in the nerdverse, and I think justifies the new association with the phrase.

An international nerd meeting has concluded that there is way too much useless man made stuff in earth’s orbit. Really? We’ve been up there like 10 times, how bad could it be? But oh yeah, all those tv, radio broadcasting, weather, communications, and global positioning satellites, space stations, rocket experiments, and human waste (including NASA’s armoire-sized ammonia container that comfortingly wasn’t safe enough to dispose of on Earth, and the epic thermal glove lost by space-walker Ed White in 1965).

I think I know what happened to that glove…

There are 30,000 pieces over 10cm and tens of thousands more smaller ones like screws and bolts and flecks of paint. The more space debris, the more they collide, break apart, and create even more pieces to potentially collide, a scenario called the Kessler effect. Concern is increasing, as they’re all traveling at hypervelocity (17,000mph) in different directions around low-Earth orbit, and won’t be pulled down by gravity for generations.

The worry is, if we wait too long to do something about it, our Earth with be so surrounded that we won’t be able to take our evening walks into space anymore for fear of being run-by-debried.

I don’t know why we can’t just make like Saturn and organize some top notch rings, but the high nerds at the meeting suggested various other solutions, including the use of “harpoons, tentacles, ion thrusters and lasers” to fix the problem. Okay, okay, all we need is Captain Ahab, the squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Enterprise, and Dr. Evil to save the world from flying death pellets of our own creation.

this… plus this… equals this!Right??

Last and definitely least, the headline:
“ ‘Big cat’ was on loose in UK in 1903”

Nothing says breaking news like centuries old, long dead, escaped wild animals. And can we define big? Because I think LION, I think TIGER, but no. Cougar? Cheetah at least? No. The menacing, gargantuan 24 pound Canadian lynx. This isn’t your default Eurasian lynx, which is a good 70 pounds, this Canadian version is “two to three times the size of a domestic cat.” Two to three times people, hide your children. This cat of Ulster was terrorizing the green fields of equal-sized foxes in the English countryside until it was finally shot and stashed in a museum, to be uncovered this year. (Not really a) mystery solved!

Hmm,..possible. It is in quotes, but usually that refers to a quote within the interview. Another quote in the interview from the article is: “They are pretty impressive cats – they are a reasonable size, and they have lots of fluffy fur which makes them look even bigger. They have sharp claws, teeth and strong muscles.” which I think was perfectly serious…